


NOSE TO TAIL (or, Five Offal Things that Happened in the Second)

by executrix



Category: The Unusuals
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 20:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Banks is worried about his health. Delahoy isn't talking about his. Walsh is cookin' with gas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	NOSE TO TAIL (or, Five Offal Things that Happened in the Second)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CaitN](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaitN/gifts).



1.  
No one talked to Eric about the Thing because, not only was it supposed to be a secret, so they weren’t supposed to know about the Thing, and Jesus, it’s not like they would have wanted to talk about it anyway. They were men, not comfortable with all that emotions crap. Well, except for Shraeger and Beaumont, and they were honorary Men or at least honorary Guys.

And, it’s not that Delahoy would ever say he was grateful. It’s probably not even that he actually was grateful. Back when, no pun intended, to keep him out of harm’s way, Sergeant Harvey Brown transferred him to the Safe & Loft Squad.

Delahoy was standing on the sidewalk, his back to the building, talking to the uniform who had caught a potential arson fire at a factory. The uniform uttered a dreadful, inhuman sound. What he could see (but Delahoy couldn’t, his back was to it), that a gigantic, and very possibly 500-LB safe came crashing through the building’s charred and smashed façade. 

When it reached the third floor, the safe did a sort of cubical pirouette. Eventually--the uniform would cheerfully have testified that it took about a year and a half-- it landed on the sidewalk, a few feet from Delahoy. 

Eric, after turning around at last, stood there with a beatific expression of pure enlightenment. He barely glanced at the safe or the chips of sidewalk showering around them. “Does it say ‘Acme’?” he asked.

The safe’s crash-landing was loud enough that it would have given him a headache, except he had one already. Just before reporting for his shift, he had a last pre-op appointment with Dr. al-Sayyid. 

Dr. Farouk al-Sayyid, slender, saturnine, and moustached, looked in some angles like an El Greco saint and in others, like a much classier version of Eric. One who didn’t have any tattoos, much less being upholstered with them. 

“I cannot conceal from you, Detective,” he said, in his impeccable Oxford accent, “That this is an experimental procedure and very hazardous. Our hope, of course, is that the targeted and implantable chemotherapy will eliminate, or in any event shrink the tumour,” (Delahoy could hear the “u” hovering transatlantically) “to the point that the now inoperable mass will become operable.”

Delahoy waved his hand. “I’m gonna die, right?”

“All men are mortal,” Dr. al-Sayyid ventured.

“No, I mean, I’m gonna die soon, like, I’m gonna beat the average by forty years. Hey, above-average at last, even if it’s in dropping dead.”

“It is true that conventional treatment has not proven to be successful.”

Delahoy shrugged. “So, of course I’m gonna roll the dice. Is this place all Nixoned up? I mean, is this being recorded?”

“Certainly not!” the doctor said. 

“Okay, then write it down. Maybe I’m gonna die on the table. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go, when I still have all…well, some…of my faculties and nobody even knows I’m sick. And when I got the hammer dropped on me, I did all the money stuff and the legal stuff. How fast can you do it?”

He went to a bar, downed a couple of Scotches, then turned up for work. He told Sergeant Brown that he needed a couple of days off. Brown signed deeply, regretting the end of the Denial phase, and started to rummage around for the medical leave paperwork. 

“Jury duty!” Delahoy said. “I’m going on jury duty!”

That was a jaw-dropper for the sergeant. “Are you kidding?” Beaumont said. “Who’d put you on a jury? Even if they hadn’t seen you testi-lying a million times?”

“Defense lawyers don’t like to seat cops,” Brandt said. (She was in the house on Crazy Eddie rounds, to discuss the latest round of The Sentences Are Insane! plea bargains on the cases the detectives therefore weren’t going to have to testify in.) “But, sure, they might take you, Eric. They like jurors who aren’t that smart.” Casey giggled. “Errr…I mean…that aren’t too sophisticated….” she back-pedaled.

2.  
“What am I, chopped liver?” Shraeger asked.

“Of course not,” Jason said, carefully lifting the enameled loaf pan out of the bath of warm water. “You are terrine des foies des volailles,” he said. When the terrine cooled, he would turn it out onto a plate and wrap it up for Casey to take home with her. 

“Wait,” Shraeger said. “Fwah…that’s “faith,” isn’t it? You’re calling me a mixed-up faith? OK, like the song says, I’m losing my religion here, but that’s different.”

“Liver,” Jason said, amazed at his own patience. Maybe he was just *such* a cop that he’d do anything for his partner. “F-o-i-e. Terrine of mixed poultry livers. I had braised goose on the menu here for Michaelmas, so I had a bunch of goose livers in the freezer. Also duck livers, and of course I butcher my own chickens…”

“Of course,” Casey said, deadpan. “Beats butchering Girl Scouts, anyway. Less paperwork.” (When he’d had a few too many, Jason sometimes hoped to catch a serial killer case where he could nickname the perp Bobby Flay.) 

“…so, lots and lots of chicken livers. And I keep house-rendered duck fat at all times…”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“So, I freeze the livers in a container of milk so they don’t get bitter. Thaw them carefully. Cleaned perfectly before freezing, of course, so there’s no need to trim. Pat them dry, sauté in pure butter, puree with cognac, season with white pepper, nutmeg, allspice. Bake in a hot-water bath with bay leaves on the top. Turkish, not California, if you’re writing it down.”

“Walsh, you know I’m not. I’m gonna pay you for the ingredients, buy you a bottle of Scotch, do your Community Sensitivity forms for you, and cut this stuff up and put it on a little plate with some, I don’t know? Lettuce? Or potato salad? And then I’m going to pan-broil a steak, Davis can watch me do that, it’s about all I do know how to cook. That and fried eggs, except the white part always turn this gross gray color. And we’ll pretend that he thinks I made this stuff for him even though I’m not gonna straight-up lie about it.” 

“He’s a man of taste,” Jason said carefully. He really didn’t like Davis Nixon—or, as he called him (silently) The Human Watergate Salad—but he couldn’t tell Shraeger that. If she wanted to go out with a boring rich guy who was born with a silver foot in his mouth, that was her problem, not his. Jason did wonder whether he was always going to be suspicious of any guy his partner dated. The same way that he felt deeply, deeply sorry for whichever unfortunate adolescent doofuses had the audacity to date Sergeant Brown’s teenage daughter. 

“He’s got this thing now, about organs, y’know?” Casey said.

“I think you’ll find that’s true of all guys,” Jason said.

“Euww! Get your mind out of the gutter! Meat! Organ meat! He read about this restaurant in England, there’s this guy…”

Jason grinned. “Fergus Henderson! He’s like George Lucas or Joss Whedon or God or something. He wrote the book, really, literally wrote a book about “nose to tail eating,” where you eat the whole animal, not just roasts and steaks and chops.”

“Yeah, well, Davis has the book, he read it in bed, like, two recipes a night like a bedtime story? And he wants to go to the restaurant.”

“The Spotted Pig,” Jason said enviously. 

“He says we should go over the weekend, but I know if I do he’ll just propose at me some more. So I keep telling him I don’t have any vacation time, we all gave it away to Eric.” She was the only one (with the possible exception of Nicole Brandt, whom she thought about only if Brandt was actually prosecuting a case that Casey had caught) who knew that Davis, far from being heedlessly wealthy, had to live on his salary and was still paying off student loans and his late mother’s nursing home bills. So it was bad enough turning him down (although she suspected that, like Harriet Vane, she would get worn down eventually) without wasting his money too. 

Maybe the prospect of a pile of grilled marrowbones and a special tool to dig into them would console him for returning to the United States un-engaged. He could just leave the little Tiffany box as a tip for the steak-and-kidney pudding.

“You don’t sound too enthusiastic about not being parted from him without death,” Jason said.

“Yeah. I don’t know. Everybody except me is his fan club, which is maybe why I’m the one he wants. Are you and Beaumont in love with each other?”

“No. I don’t know either. I don’t know what Allison’s story is, I guess if I was in love with her I’d maybe have a signal. I was in love with—you know, my girl, the one that died. The one who was murdered. Because of me. So is that, like, chicklit or guilt? Beaumont can take care of herself. She’s a great girl. She’s a lot of fun. She’s good police. That’s not what you mean, is it?”

The Second’s house dates way, way back—back before women could be just plain Police Officers instead of having a special, and distinctly inferior, service of their own. The women’s locker room is therefore a later addition, designed by guys who approached as close as they could to locating the locker room in an actual sewer. 

There were only two rows of metal lockers, with one wooden bench between them, just about big enough for two women to sit on without creating the kind of situation that Delahoy fantasized about all the time. 

Casey wasn’t looking, particularly, but she thought that Ally McBalls was wearing a really nice bra (Agent Provocateur, beige satin push-up trimmed with café-au-lait lace). Casey was wearing the chartreuse one from her assortment of Hanes for Her sports bras. For a split second she worried about whether her eighth grade lesbian phase was occurring even later than Brandt’s, but then she reassured herself that she had a lot more admiration for the bra than for its contents. 

“Hey, Walsh said you were over at the diner a couple of days back,” Allison said, zipping up her thigh-high boots. 

Casey, blouse halfway over her head, swiveled around to look at Allison and gauge if Allison was jealous. When the blouse dropped down into its proper place, Casey said, “Yeah. Jason’s great, isn’t he? We were cooking. Well, he cooked for me. He made me some kind of fancy French thing out of ground-up bird livers because Davis goes for that stuff.” 

“Man, I don’t eat that crap,” Beaumont said. “I’m strictly a meat and potatoes girl.”

“Me too,” Casey said. “But…well, Davis doesn’t get what he wants on the important stuff, I want to make him happy on the little stuff.”

“Wait, you’re not sleeping with him?”

“Of course I’m sleeping with him, this isn’t 1892 or whatever.”

“Well, girl, you better throw away your birth control pills, and nail that guy down before some bitch grabs him outta your pocket. ‘Cause he’s the perfect man. He’s rich, he’s handsome, whatever fancy thing he does in that skyscraper office of his probably no one’s gonna shoot him, and he’s crazy about you.” 

“I like him,” Casey said. “He’s nice. But he’s boring.”

“Don’t matter if he’s your ticket outta here. You think I’m gonna put in my twenty?”

Casey shrugged. “Well, I’m not. Few more years, I’ll start looking around for a cushy security gig. Desk job. Corner office. If I still have to work at all, if I’m not a Real Housewives of Someplace.”

“What about Jason? Isn’t **he** perfect? I mean, the perfect man for you. He’s my partner, so, that would be, like, incest, so I wouldn’t date him. But you?”

“Last man on Earth I’d marry is a cop. They’re dogs, and you know it. And they drink too much and most of ‘em steal and if you really like one of them, some bastard perp is gonna blow them out of their socks and leave you a widow. If he wasn’t a cop…I guess I’d never have met him, unless, maybe, someone stole his car and I caught the squeal. Now that I met him, it’s no big Bachelorette thing, y’know? He’s kinda cute, we have fun, and for a little guy he’s not such a little guy….”

“Euww! Brain bleach!” Casey said.

3.  
“Hey, Beaumont,” Jason said. “Wanna do something illegal?”

Allison did not deign to look up from the pile of DD-5s in front of her. “We did that on Tuesday. And anyway by now it’s probably only illegal in, like, nine states.”

“No, really,” he said. Even before he finished the whispered (in case there were any undercover journalists around) explanation, Allison sighed and said, “Oh hells yeah.”

Only three more days to go before Banks’ birthday, and the panic level was getting on Jason’s last nerve. Therefore, he got everything set up and in place. He had to wait until Delahoy’s day off. Surely Eric would recognize Dr. Monica Crumb, Jason’s current accomplice, one-time ME, and Delahoy’s former squeeze. (And, more to the point, she would recognize him and possibly kill him with an undetectable poison. Or give him a vasectomy with a fire ax.) 

Monica was waiting out her license suspension working in a nursing home, where she found the patients only slightly livelier and better company than her last gig. 

Jason had the crew set up, in place, and waiting for his signal. It was twenty minutes into the shift and, as usual, Banks was chowing down on Tylenol with Codeine and staring into the mirror of Casey’s never-used powder compact (vintage Helena Rubinstein; gold; Christmas present from Davis) to see if his pupils were unequal.

Walsh took a deep breath, reminded himself that his strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. And also, he had Eddie Alvarez’ phone number on speed dial, if necessary he would send Nicole over to spring him, and even though she was a prosecutor she knew all the good defense lawyers. And, of course, there would be skilled medical personnel close at hand. Jason sent the text, knowing that he had three minutes to close the deal. 

He went over to Banks’ desk. “You don’t look well,” he said. He leaned over and tenderly rested the back of his hand on Banks’ forehead.

“Hey!” Leo said.

“You’re hot!” Jason said.

“Jason, if you’re trying to tell me something about this one time at Spring Training, it’s okay, but it’s not my scene, y’know?”

“No, I said, you’re HOT, not YOU’RE hot! I mean, warm! Your forehead is warm! I think you have a fever!” 

To convince Leo Banks that he had a fever was no more difficult than convincing an American Idol applicant that he or she is talented, so Jason probably didn’t even need the next step but he preferred to leave no stone unturned. 

Walsh turned to face the center of the squadroom. “Has anybody got one of those plastic thermometer things? You know, that you put on your forehead?” (because he REALLY didn’t want to get into a…discussion…with Banks about where the thermometer was going to go).

“I do!” Beaumont piped up, standing up and handing it to Walsh. Without, of course, pointing out that she had stashed it on top of her steaming venti half-caf half-skinny mochaccino. Jason slapped the band onto Banks’ forehead. “Omigod!” Jason yelled. “One-hundred-and-four!”

“I’m callin’ 911,” Allison said, pretending to do so. Moments later, the squad room door was shoved open by a crew in scrubs, fluorescent yellow rubber gloves, plastic shower caps, and plastic booties. Walsh knew that Tyvek bunny suits would have been more authentic, but he was working against the clock, and they had all the other stuff except the rubber gloves, which were straight from the 99Cent Store. 

“Is Detective Leo Banks here?” asked the really tall, broad guy who towered over Dr. Crumb although, to be fair, who didn’t? 

“That’s me,” Banks said weakly. The tall guy brandished a clipboard threateningly. “We have information showing that you were at the Holterhauf warehouse in the South Street Seaport yesterday.”

“Sure,” Banks said. “Witness interviews. There was a homicide nearby.” 

“You’ll have to come with us,” the tall guy said. “CDC. You were exposed to CGFS.”

“Say WHAT?” Banks said.

“Chapultepec Gerbil Flu Syndrome. Looks like it’ll shape up into a bigger menace than SARS.” 

The big guy spoke into his walkie-talkie. Two members of the crew dashed out of the squadroom, returning a moment later with the gurney they had stashed outside. They hustled Banks onto it, flat on his back, while Monica went on pointe to slap an oxygen mask on his face. 

Cole steepled his hands and bowed his head to pray. 

Sergeant Brown, watching the chaos eddy away, jerked his head in the direction of his office. “What did you do this time, Walsh?”

“Moi?” Jason said innocently.

Brown shook his head. “At least Delahoy is coming back tomorrow, it won’t matter so much that Banks is on the DL.”

Which was true—Delahoy did come back on Tuesday, although he stayed less than a week. A few days after the surgery, when he had been sent home with a long list of follow-up appointments (and an implied “if you turn up dead, don’t blame us”) and a longer list of prescriptions, he woke up in his own bed with a dreadful sense of foreboding. Everything felt different, wrong. He couldn’t see the bedroom ceiling, whose cracks he had memorized over many a sleepless night.

Then he realized that he couldn’t see the ceiling because he had vaulted out of bed. His head felt wrong because its unwanted tenant—the crushing headache—had moved out. He didn’t have to squint to clear his bleared vision. Instead of sipping at half a cup of ginger ale to wash down a few saltines, he arrived at the station, moustache trimmed with bits of the triple-fried-egg-and-sausage-with-extra-Sriricha-and-mayo from Dagmar and Omar’s food cart. 

“Wow, man, you look happy,” Banks said. “Only…hey, what happened to your hand?”

Eric looked down at his palm. It was welling with blood where he had a paper cut from a Be On the Lookout bulletin. He went to the john, washed it off, and wrapped a paper towel around his hand. It soon flooded with red and stuck to his hand.

Delahoy went to the vending machine and punched in his usual order (Chicken Bouillon, with Extra Creamer). For once, the liquid it delivered was actually hot. He lifted out the cup. The muscles of his hand spasmed, sending scalding liquid across the purple-and-green facing of the vending machine, onto the floor, but mostly down the front of Delahoy’s sharply creased khakis.

“You’re not in court today, are you?” Beaumont asked. “’Cause, yellow stain down the front of your pants…way to build credibility.”

Delahoy trudged back to the john and scrubbed his pants with cold water and enough paper towels to leave pills of paper around his crotch. He was trying to direct the stream of hot, well, warm-ish, air in the hand dryer to his pants when Sergeant Brown walked in.

“Jesus, Delahoy,” Brown said. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

“Not anymore,” Eric said.

“Well, get an outcall or something.” 

Wednesday and Thursday passed without incident, apart from the diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome when he asked the department doctor about the hand spasm, and the effects of a bad oyster on a blind date that wasn’t even that enjoyable otherwise.

Friday morning, Delahoy was late clocking in for his shift, and even missed Roll Call, which was a cardinal sin. His phone went straight to voicemail. He wasn’t in his apartment, and the snoopy little old lady across the hall had no useful information when Beaumont and Cole went to check on him. 

When they got back to squadroom, Schraeger gave them the bad news. “Well, we found him. It’s not good. The hospital called…” she said. “…they said his condition is stable. Whatever that means.” 

4.  
“Hi!” said the scut puppy who, to Delahoy, appeared to be about eleven, as if Disney decided to do a tween remake of Dougie Howser, M.D. “Now that you’re conscious again, I’m supposed to ask you a few questions. Do you remember what happened?”

“Well, I was leaving the ATM, I needed some cash for the weekend, and the floor was kind of slippery, so I fell and at first I thought it was okay, I got up and got to the curb but fell down and there was this car…”

“Yeah, that part is pretty obvious,” said Rick Pruzaniek, NYU Med ’09. “No, I mean, there’s a whole big mess of scar tissue on the back of your head. Once we got your legs stabilized, we MRI’d your squash, just to figure out what was happening. Just in case, because the car was at the other end of you, y’know? But we couldn’t find anything wrong except for the scars.”

Eric began to giggle. 

Brand-new Doctor Pruzaniek started scribbling things on the chart at the foot of the bed. “OK, I’ll just say that you don’t remember, that’s not unusual with head injuries. Or whatever was going on in there.”

“Kiddo, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Delahoy said.

“Well, at least you’re awake,” Rick said, thinking that his patient was in pretty good spirits for somebody with both his legs in plaster and in traction. “You’re better off than this guy…” and gestured in the direction of the other bed in the room. 

Delahoy craned his neck, which was about all he could do in terms of movement. Ignoring privacy rights, Rick swept aside the two curtains dividing the beds. 

The man in the next bed was motionless, an oxygen mask strapped to his face, a handful of monitors beeping and flashing around him. Without the bulletproof vest, Delahoy almost didn’t recognize him. “Weird case,” Rick said. “A bunch of guys came in from the CDC, very hush-hush, said he had some kind of hamster flu I never heard of and they had to put him in an elective coma until…well, today. We’re bringing him out now.” 

5.  
Banks opened his eyes. He could barely move. Something seemed to be tethering him, including things connected to parts of his body that he didn’t want anybody monkeying with without a search warrant or, his last, best, and final offer, a marriage license. 

He was wearing his boxers under the hospital gown, which was good in terms of basic decency, now that his room had turned into Grand Central Station. Although, it probably meant that while he was zonked out it had increased the amount of time needed to shove in some of those tubes. 

The room was full—which didn’t take much. The hospital room had obviously been designed to hold one bed, but it held two, with a large assortment of medical devices, cops, helium balloons, and a giant teddy bear filling in the gaps. 

A couple of cold bottles of Perrier-Jouet champagne were being passed around, a la 40. Jason had a little smear of scarlet lipgloss, because he took the slug after Allison. Harvey’s latest swig tasted slightly of camphor from Casey’s lip balm. Eddie Alvarez shared the carton of Bacardi Breezers that Nicole brought. Henry Cole, over in the corner more or less hidden behind the teddy bear, was drinking tomato juice and praying. He didn’t feel comfortable kneeling to do so, even under cover of stuffed animal, so he was seriously considering making a break for the hospital chapel. 

“Happy belated birthday!” Jason said. 

“Huh?” Banks said. 

“Yeah. You’re 43. Your birthday was two days ago. Look, here’s the Daily News, you can see I’m not kiddin’ you.”

“You could have that stuff printed,” Banks said suspiciously. 

Casey gestured toward the tiny TV suspended overhead, the sound muted. The stock market ticker at the bottom gave the day’s date. 

“This is not right,” Banks said. “I was supposed to die.”

“And this is a problem WHY?” Casey asked. 

“You sort of died,” Cole said. “To be fair. Your life functions were artificially suppressed. Did you go through a tunnel to the white light? Did you see Our Lord? I wish I could.”

“I could drop-kick you through that window,” Allison said. 

Leo stirred a little in bed, and heard a weird crackling sound coming from near his navel. He could just about reach his hand there without pulling out any tubes. There was a piece of paper there.

“It’s upside-down,” Beaumont said. “I pinned it that way so you could read it.”

“She’s thoughtful that way,” Jason said, draping his arm around her shoulder and giving a quick squeeze. 

The sheet of paper (safety-pinned to what proved to be fuchsia silk boxer shorts) read, BANKS: TOO BIG TO FAIL.

**Author's Note:**

> I assume that the events of the show took place more or less when it was broadcast, in 2009. 
> 
> Watergate Salad is made out of pistachio pudding, Cool-Whip, and canned pineapple.
> 
> Fergus Henderson and The Spotted Pig are real.


End file.
